The Rothman Scandal

by Stephen Birmingham

“Just a simple little picnic,” someone commented.

  “I hope it doesn’t get too chilly later on,” Maggie Van Zuylen said. “But in case it does, I’ve had this section of the dunes heated.”

  Alex saw that she wasn’t kidding. Large electric braziers stood in readiness at the periphery of the party, to be moved closer to the tables should the need arise. Alex was making mental notes of all of this, for possible use in her picnic issue.

  “Alex, darling,” Maggie Van Zuylen said, “I have a special surprise for you this evening. But I seem to have lost her for the moment. I’ll see if I can find her.”

  More barefoot, white-coated men were circulating among the guests, passing trays of hors d’oeuvres and taking drink orders. Alex accepted a glass of champagne from one of them.

  “She’s using her Baccarat on the beach!” she heard someone say and, through the crowd, she spotted the metallic cage of orange curls that belonged to Mona Potter. Across one section of sand, a volleyball net had been set up, and a group of bikini-clad young men had started a game, and Alex could see why lifeguards referred to men’s bikinis as banana hammocks. She made a mental note: No men in bikinis in my picnic issue.

  She was also, naturally, noticing what the women were wearing. It was, as Mel had said, mostly shorts and cutoffs, halters, cotton T-shirts, and tank tops. But she spotted one young woman, who had the figure for it, wearing what was obviously a white cashmere T-shirt, something new. She made a mental note of that.

  Maggie Van Zuylen had roped off her section of the beach—from the waterline to her seawall—with velvet-covered chains hooked to stanchions, like those used to control crowds in a theater lobby. This was probably quite illegal, since all American beaches technically belonged to the public, at least as far up as the high-water mark. But no one would have the temerity to cross Maggie’s barriers and crash such an elaborate party, though a small group of onlookers had gathered on the other side of the stanchions to watch the goings-on.

  If these outsiders had joined the party, they would have heard very different conversational gambits than one heard at parties in Manhattan. In Manhattan, the talk was generally of divorces, love affairs, interior designers, and security systems. In the Hamptons, it was usually about real estate.

  Moving through the crowd, brushing lips with some of the guests, squeezing the hands of others, Alex listened to them.

  “They’re asking fifty thousand for July first through Labor Day—unfurnished.”

  “Memorial Day, I could see that much. But July first?”

  “If it doesn’t have an ocean view, I say forget it.”

  “Frankly, I’d rather be on a pond than on the ocean. The damned salt spray. Maggie has to have her windows washed twice a week.”

  “And what about Mel Jorgenson’s house? He must have to have his windows washed every day!” Mel’s glass house on the dunes in Sagaponack had caused much local comment ever since he built it.

  “They’ll never develop that property. It’s zoned one-A residential.”

  “Well, his brother-in-law is on the zoning commission, so we’ll see.”

  “The Allertons will sue if anybody tries to put condos there.”

  “Frank says let ’em sue. The publicity will help him sell his condos.…”

  “They’re asking four-point-nine? For that dump? They’ll never get it.…”

  “She paid eighty thousand for her pool, and it’s only one-third filtered.”

  “She should sue the contractor.”

  “I don’t care what you say. Keeping a pool at eighty degrees is one thing. But ninety is ridiculous.”

  “You think your taxes are bad. Mine are sixteen thousand a month.”

  “There’s Alex Rothman.”

  “Darling, she’s about to be history.”

  The sun was going down, and the smell of steaming seafood was in the air. Very carefully, the white-coated young men were scraping the hot stones away from the top of the clambake with long-handled rakes. Others were lighting the Hawaiian torches, while still others were turning the roasting pig on its spit, the fat hissing and flaming as it hit the live coals.

  “I didn’t know Zabar’s would sell a whole boar,” someone was saying.

  “Neither did they, till I ordered it!” said the hostess in her farmerette’s outfit of blue velvet coveralls and many gold chains. Alex had a thought: a story on outrageous picnics?

  Mel touched Alex’s arm. “I’m going up to check on Cronkite’s water before we eat,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Who’re you?” Mona Potter was saying, on her fourth glass of wine, peering myopically at a guest she did not immediately recognize. “Are you supposed to be anybody?”

  Mel Jorgenson made his way back through the gardens carrying water in a large Baccarat highball glass. Floodlights lit some of the specimen rhododendron bushes, and low, invisible lighting illuminated the boxwood parterres, while other floodlights beamed up into the trunks and canopies of some of the larger trees. It was a far cry from the picnics of his youth—hard-cooked eggs on a paper plate, laid out on a sandy towel at Coney Island. He could still feel the sand in his teeth from the eggs. “You’ve got to eat a pound of dirt before you die,” his mother said.

  Even in the fading light, it was easy enough to pick out Scarlett O’Hara from the two hundred—odd cars in “Finisterra” ’s parking lot, and he headed toward her with his water glass, and opened the door on the driver’s side. “Ho, Cronkite,” he said.

  Then he jumped back with alarm, and dropped the glass, which shattered at his feet on the pavement. A pile of glittering fabric lay across his front seat, and it was moving.

  Then he realized that it was a woman’s body sprawled across the bucket seats, and that she was sobbing uncontrollably.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said. And then, “Can I help you?”

  She gave a little startled cry, and looked up at him, her eyes streaming. Immediately she reached for a pair of oversize sunglasses that lay beside her on the seat, and put them on, and he recognized her. “Miss Fenton,” he said.

  “Oh, please,” she sobbed. “Please forgive me! I didn’t know where to go. Yours was the only car I could find that was unlocked, with the windows open. I just had to get away from that party. I didn’t know where to go. I came here.”

  “What happened?”

  “Look at me!” she sobbed, sitting up and gesturing to her dress, which was full and floorlength and glistening with gold and silver embroidery. “Just look at me!”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “It’s my new Chanel. I bought it just for this party. And look at my shoes!” She lifted her long skirts to show him her shoes, which were gold pumps with high, thin stiletto heels. “Look at me! I’m supposed—supposed to be going to work for the—the leading fashion magazine in the world, and I came dressed like this. I look like a fool, I look like a clown!”

  “It’s a very pretty dress.”

  “But did you see what the others were wearing? Blue jeans. Swimsuits. Bare feet. I couldn’t even take off my shoes because I’m wearing hose!” She sobbed again. “A beach party,” she said. “I had no idea what she meant by a beach party. We don’t have beach parties in Britain. And so I came dressed—like this!”

  “I think you look just fine,” he said.

  “People were giggling about me behind my back. I just know they were. They had to have been. I just had to get out of there. The hostess—this Mrs. Van Zuylen—I don’t even know her!” She dabbed at her eyes behind the big glasses. “It’s just too humiliating,” she said, and then, “Forgive me for carrying on like this. I shouldn’t even be sitting here in your car.”

  “I just came back to see if my dog needed water,” he said, looking back at Cronkite who lay sleeping peacefully across the back seat, his head between his front paws.

  “Your pooch and I have become great friends,” she said with a little sniffle. “His water dish was getting a little low, but I fi
lled it from that little stream that runs through the garden.”

  “That was nice of you.”

  “Sheep dogs are my favorite breed. So lovable.” She reached behind her and scratched Cronkite’s nose. His eyes blinked open, then closed. “I must go,” she said. “I need to call a taxi. But I don’t know where to find a telephone. I don’t want to go back into the house, dressed like this.”

  Mel looked briefly at his car phone. Then he said, “Would you like me to drive you home?”

  “Oh, would you?” she said eagerly. “That would be terribly kind of you, Mr. Jorgenson! That would be just the kindest thing.”

  “Where’re you staying?”

  “It’s a place called Gurney’s Inn,” she said. “It’s on—I believe it’s called the Montauk Road.”

  “I know Gurney’s Inn,” he said. He glanced at his watch. Gurney’s Inn was at least a twenty-five-minute drive in each direction. “Okay, let’s go,” he said, and hopped into the car beside her.

  “You really are too kind,” she said.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “You see,” she said, as he pulled the car out of the lot and started down the Van Zuylens’ long drive toward Gin Lane, “I really don’t know Mr. and Mrs. Van Zuylen, and that’s what makes it so much worse—to come to someone’s house, someone you’ve never met, dressed all wrong. At least it does to me. To someone who’s supposed to know a little about fashion, to come dressed all wrong to someone’s house you’ve never met. Or does that seem like a terribly silly form of female vanity to you, Mr. Jorgenson? Can you understand a woman’s vanity?”

  “I guess I can,” he said. “By the way, how’d you know my name?”

  “My goodness, you’re famous from the telly. I recognized you right away!”

  “Aha!” he said.

  “She called me yesterday out of the blue, this Mrs. Van Zuylen,” she said. “And asked me to her party tonight. Out of the blue. I’d no idea who she was.”

  “That will happen in New York,” he said. “Once your name is in Mona Potter’s column, everybody in town wants to meet you. It doesn’t matter whether they know you or not. They’ll invite you to their parties to check you out.”

  “You see? That’s what I meant. I knew I was to be checked out tonight, and that’s why I couldn’t bear to stay, dressed as I am. Anyway, I rang up my friend Mr. Herbert Rothman, and he told me that Mrs. Van Zuylen is one of your most important hostesses, and that I should by all means accept. He neglected, however, to tell me what I ought to wear for this ‘party at my beach,’ as she put it,” she added with a little laugh. “Obviously.”

  “Herb Rothman wasn’t invited?”

  “In fact, he was. But Mr. Rothman is in San Francisco this weekend, on some sort of company business. He urged me to come alone. He recommended this hotel called Gurney’s Inn, where I’m stopping.”

  He turned out onto the Montauk Highway, and she fell silent.

  “Tell me about yourself, Miss Fenton,” he said at last.

  “Please call me Fiona.”

  “All right. Tell me about yourself, Fiona.”

  “Oh, you don’t really want to hear about me, Mr. Jorgenson.”

  “And I’m Mel.”

  “You don’t really want to hear about me, do you, Mel?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Well—” She seemed to hestitate. “I had a fairly typical English girlhood, I suppose. Brought up, rather strictly, by nannies, in a picture-postcard little English village—nannies who kept me carefully protected from the facts of life. Two doting parents, and—oh!” And suddenly he realized she was weeping again.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked her.

  “I can’t—I just can’t,” she sobbed.

  “Can’t what?”

  “I just can’t go on telling all these lies, Mel!”

  “Lies? What lies?”

  “The lies I’ve told everyone … the lies I’ve told Mr. Rothman. The lie I’ve made of my whole life … I just can’t go on …”

  “Care to tell me about that?” he said, interested.

  “If I tell you the truth—the real truth—the truth I’ve never told another living soul, will you promise not to tell anyone? Will you promise not to tell Mr. Rothman?”

  “Promise,” he said.

  “Because it isn’t a pretty story.” She blew her nose into her hanky, and dabbed at her eyes. “How well do you know England, Mel?” she asked him then.

  “I’ve been to London often. But the rest of England—not well at all.”

  “Have you heard of Viscount Hesketh?”

  “No.”

  “Viscount Hesketh’s name is known in England, but very little is known about the man himself. He is famously reclusive, and hardly ever leaves Hesketh Castle, where he lives. Few people outside his family have ever seen him. I guess you could describe him as one of our famous English eccentrics. There’s a certain mystery about him.”

  “Hm,” he said.

  “Viscount Hesketh is my father.”

  “Oho,” he said.

  “My mother left him when I was a very little girl. I hardly have any memories of my mother, though I do have photographs of her. She was very beautiful. She left him—ran off—to Spain, we think, though we don’t know. She disappeared, and no one has ever seen or heard from her again.”

  “Another man?”

  “Perhaps. No one knows. But we think she left him because she found out what was going on.”

  “Oh? What was going on?”

  “I have an older sister, Bridget. Two years older, who lives in Australia now. She escaped. I wasn’t so lucky. It started with Bridget. Then it was my turn.”

  “What started?”

  “It started when we were little girls—first Bridget, then me. I don’t even remember when it started with me, I was that young. Three, perhaps. He would ask me to touch him in—intimate places. Then he would ask me to do other things, intimate things—things that were—degenerate.”

  “How awful,” he said quietly.

  “But no,” she said. “No! It wasn’t awful! I loved my father! I worshipped him! I adored him—I thought he was a god! I was raised by nannies, and they told me my father was a god! He was Viscount Hesketh, Earl of Langdon! He could do no wrong! Of course they never knew about the things we did together. That was our secret, Pater’s and mine. And I loved the secret things we did together, loved them more and more as the years went by, and I’m sure Bridget loved them, too. I looked forward to our secret times together—I grew to crave them! I thought he was the most wonderful father a girl could ever have. I thought I was the luckiest girl in the world to have a father who loved me so much, and in that special, wonderful way! It wasn’t until later—much later—that I learned that what we had done was considered evil, that it was called a sin against God and man, and that there was a word for it—incest. And that, in the eyes of every civilized society in the world, my beloved father was a degenerate, morally polluted, perverted in the most contemptible of human ways.”

  He glanced at her and, in the lights reflected from the dashboard, he saw that tears were standing in her eyes.

  “That was when the guilt set in—guilt in knowing that I’d enjoyed my sin, enjoyed my willing share of his evil, encouraged the evil, helped bring the devil into our house. I felt I was going to explode with guilt! Can you understand how I felt?”

  He nodded. “Yes, I suppose I can,” he said.

  “Bridget had already gone through the same thing. She had made her escape. I knew I had to escape from that evil house. I tried. I was seventeen, and I went to London, found a job, and tried to hide from him, from the past, from everything, but I knew he was still after me, with detectives hired to find me, and bring me back. Then—”

  “Then?”

  “Then, in London, I met the most wonderful young man. He was a soldier, stationed at Aldershot. We fell in love, and I thought—at last, escape! He asked to marry me, and we were married a
t the Post Office registry office. We were so much in love, and those few months we had together were the happiest in my life. But my father found out about it. Even though most people thought of him as a harmless old eccentric, he had friends high up in the War Office. He had influence. After all, he was Viscount Hesketh, Earl of Langdon, a Peer of the Realm! The Order of the Garter! All his mates from Eton were in the War Office. In Britain, the old school ties mean everything—more than human life itself, it sometimes seems. This was just before the Falklands War, and so, when the war started, my father saw to it that Eric was ordered there, and placed in the front lines. And so—and so—my beautiful young husband never came home from the Falkland Islands. He’s buried there—and I—and I—they sent his uniform home to me in a box, wrapped in a British flag. It’s all I have left of him, his uniform, and the flag they draped his coffin in.”

  “What a terribly sad story, Fiona,” he said. “I’m—awfully sorry.”

  “His head was blown off by machine-gun fire. But why am I telling you all of this? I never even told Eric about my father and myself. I was certain, if I told him about any of that, he would stop loving me, that he would be repelled by me, that he would think me a less than worthless person, a piece of spoiled and damaged goods. And the guilt was still exploding inside me. It still is. Sometimes, when I think about it too much, I think my whole being will explode with guilt. And on top of that was my guilt over Eric’s death, because if he hadn’t married me he would still be alive.”

  “You mustn’t think that, Fiona.”

  “But I do! I do. But why am I telling you all of this—you, almost a complete stranger?”

  “Sometimes it helps to share your feelings with another person.”

  “Perhaps it’s because you were kind enough to let me blubber in your car, and offered to drive me home,” she said. “Anyway, after Eric died, I got another job. I worked for a little fashion publication called Lady Fair—just an advertising giveaway sheet, really, with offices in Maida Vale. Nothing at all like Mode. Then, for a while, I worked in a dress shop in Sloane Street, which was where I began to learn a little bit about fashion. Then, last December, I happened to meet Mr. Herbert Rothman in London, where he was on business, and he seemed to take a fancy to me—nothing romantic, of course, but he seemed interested in my fashion philosophy which, if I do say so myself, is a bit different from others, and he asked me if I would like to come to America to work for Mode. Of course I was thrilled! The chance to work with the great Alexandra Rothman, who is such a legend. Mr. Rothman seemed like my salvation at last—my savior. He arranged everything. I had no passport, no green card to work in America—he took care of all of that. Suddenly, it seemed as though I had a fairy godfather. At last I could escape. I thought if I put an ocean between myself and my guilt, perhaps it would go away. It hasn’t.”